Defining the Boundaries of Buddhist Psychology: Liang Qichao and Taixu in Republican China

In Republican China, “Buddhist psychology” became a contested name for relating accounts of mind to a modern academic discipline. This article compares Liang Qichao’s views with Taixu’s writings, read alongside periodicals and the proposed curriculum of the Wuchang Buddhist Academy. Their comparisons rested on overlapping questions about cognition and selfhood, but translation also reorganized the materials and standards being compared. Liang classified Buddhist analyses and accounts of cultivation as psychology while placing the highest realization beyond scholarly inquiry. Taixu distinguished secular from Buddhist psychology and included cultivation and realized wisdom within the latter, while accepting limited behavioral investigation. Their shared transformative concerns thus accompanied different definitions of the scope and authority of psychological knowledge. Journals and curricular planning brought these competing definitions into academic and Buddhist settings. Buddhist psychology thus functioned as a boundary category through which authors negotiated how Buddhist accounts of mind could count as psychological knowledge.